Lecture 9: Intro to Ray-Tracing & Accelerating Ray-Scene Intersection (14)
aliwang2001
Huge Disney fan and wanted to search up some of their work and behind the scenes in ray tracing.
This is their demo for real time ray tracing in the new Star Wars interactive ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZiSDtDhkyU
Here's an article about Disney's Hyperion renderer that does most of Disney's ray tracing: https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/
Sicheng-Pan
It seems that this approach can get very inefficient when the resolution of the image is high, or the number of items in the scene is large. Is there any way to optimize this process?
wangdotjason
Would it be possible to trace cones or other volumes instead of rays? It seems very costly to trace a ray for each pixel. Maybe we could trace the corners of a bounding box of pixels and interpolate the middle pixels. Or we could send rays out only to "interesting" parts of the image such as edges and use a heuristic to guess surfaces.
Spectato54
I think the exchange between realism and efficiency in graphics is extremely interesting. We can see the relationship here in recursive ray tracing. The rays recursively being cast based on different properties such as shadows, refraction, reflection that add to realism, but as many pointed out, it's extremely costly to produce and execute.
sZwX74
@wangdotjason I think tracing rays individually results in the most realistic scenes, as we going ray-by-ray gives us the finest level of granularity. If we were to trace cones or other volumes, they could be deformed when reflected off of a surface, and then in the next layer what we would be tracing would no longer be a cone.
hukellyy
Recursive ray tracing seems like a great technique to leverage if the goal or purpose is to create hyper realistic scenes. However, like many other students have mentioned, there are tradeoffs with the technique being significantly more costly. For me, this definitely put into perspective how much bandwidth and resources that animation and production companies pour into creating their pieces and movies.
Huge Disney fan and wanted to search up some of their work and behind the scenes in ray tracing.
This is their demo for real time ray tracing in the new Star Wars interactive ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZiSDtDhkyU
Here's an article about Disney's Hyperion renderer that does most of Disney's ray tracing: https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/
It seems that this approach can get very inefficient when the resolution of the image is high, or the number of items in the scene is large. Is there any way to optimize this process?
Would it be possible to trace cones or other volumes instead of rays? It seems very costly to trace a ray for each pixel. Maybe we could trace the corners of a bounding box of pixels and interpolate the middle pixels. Or we could send rays out only to "interesting" parts of the image such as edges and use a heuristic to guess surfaces.
I think the exchange between realism and efficiency in graphics is extremely interesting. We can see the relationship here in recursive ray tracing. The rays recursively being cast based on different properties such as shadows, refraction, reflection that add to realism, but as many pointed out, it's extremely costly to produce and execute.
@wangdotjason I think tracing rays individually results in the most realistic scenes, as we going ray-by-ray gives us the finest level of granularity. If we were to trace cones or other volumes, they could be deformed when reflected off of a surface, and then in the next layer what we would be tracing would no longer be a cone.
Recursive ray tracing seems like a great technique to leverage if the goal or purpose is to create hyper realistic scenes. However, like many other students have mentioned, there are tradeoffs with the technique being significantly more costly. For me, this definitely put into perspective how much bandwidth and resources that animation and production companies pour into creating their pieces and movies.